Customer Reviews

The Living Company

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Arie de Gues is known to some management students as the person whose research spurred Peter Senge to do work on the "learning Organisation". In this book Arie talks about the evolving notion of the organization as a living being, instead of just an "economic entity" whose main purpose of existence is to survive, fulfill its potential, and to become great. Plain talking and cutting free from jargon, Arie illustrates this idea with examples from his career in Royal Dutch Shell and the studies Shell had carried out on long lasting and big organizations (they found only around 40 odd !!). This book needs to read by entreprenuers, business people and academicians to look at their organizations as some thing else apart from a money making machine ! Revolutionary!!

Arie de Geus is probably the most unique business thinker around. He combines the pragmatism of someone who had a very successful career at Shell with the curiosity of a talented academic. Behind this unique perspective is a deep appreciation for people. Most of us automatically relate to organizations like Newton related to the natural world, as one big physical mechanism. We casually talk about "aligning parts of the organization", "operating in organizational smokestacks or silos", and "fixing communications channels". Mr. de Geus helps us learn to think about organizations from the natural perspective, as living organisms, subject to many of the same limitations and forces as individual people are. When you read this book, you will become a much better and more effective person in all parts of your life. You will also feel better about yourself, and make those around you feel better about themselves. Read THE LIVING COMPANY today. This book is a wonderful gift to us all!

If I have to stay with only one business book in my shelf( I have more than 300 in the last count), the living company would be this book. My review will be more emotional I think. This is so, because the way this book touched me. I read it three times and some time think I have to read it again.

This is a very similar with the "Built to last", one of the bestsellers of Amazon. If you liked that book this will be an excellent complement of your reading and thoughts.

Perhaps this is the book that a Startup's CEOs should had read before launch their enterprise, because one of the characteristic of a living company is that they are conservative in their finances.

De Geus wrote a book that it is not limit to a period of time like recent books dot com books. By this I mean that you can go back to it and reapply its contents in your business reality again and again.

An import thing to say is that this is a book of principles, not rules or easy steps to success. Although the author is going to show you that there is a pattern in all the living company, he goes beyond that, showing the root that origin these patterns. The principles was constructed by observing companies, specially Royal Doutch/shell, were Arie de Geus worked for many years, but with the help of other disciplines like psychology and biology, which study the behavior and life of humans and animals. To discuss about innovation for instance, you will observe how a specie of bird is very smart to pass a learning to the whole specie. And to understand how we react or anticipate an external change in our business, it will be useful to look some psychology's theories about the human mind, and so on.

Don't think this is a book for academic public, it is not. You will find not only theories but many examples and cases of the thesis of De Geus. But it is different, I think, of the recent business book. Some times it seems so easy to look a successful company today and says "look, this is what you have to do in your company". A couple of years ago you could find many books explaining why Netscape was so great. Where are Netscape now?. It would not pass in the test of time.

So if you are only worried to make your money no matter what is going to happen to your company, this is not a book for you. Probably you are Jim Clark type. Read the new, new thing instead. But if you thing that management is more than stock options ( I said more. I am saying that is a consequence not the only objective), if you believe the every company must have a reason to exist, if you believe the people are important, than I guarantee, you gonna like this book, tell me about

Arie de Geus's premise - that there are two kinds of companies: economic companies (which exist primarily to make money) and living companies (which exist primarily to continue to exist and be all they can be) - isn't novel. The theme was well developed - perhaps more rigorously - in Collins' and Porras' Built to Last.

De Geus' contribution is therefore one of providing a human perspective, in some ways giving an idea of what it is like as a person or as a manager to work in a company which is alive. In this he succeeds.

I must admit my view was tinged a little by my experiences as a manager in the Royal Dutch/Shell group of the 90's, dealing with the consequences of massive errors in the allocation of capital, many of which happened under Mr. de Geus's watch as Planning Coordinator. Whether Shell will be able to resist the misguided pressures of its shareholders (and of highly paid consultants) and stay a living company remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, an excellent contribution, with much wisdom.

This book really resonates with my philosophy that we can all accomplish a lot more by coordinating, communicating, sharing, and preparing together. Mr. de Geus frees each of us to be fully human, and to humanize the organizations we are part of. He successfully challenges the limits of the mechanical view of human interactions, and provides a great vision into what is possible. A good complement for this book is "The 2,000 Percent Solution" -- a book that shows each of us how to tap into our innate talents to create world-class solutions through asking and answering a better set of questions. I also recommend "The Pursuit of Prime." With these three books, you can accomplish anything!

Companies die all the time. The current business climate favors short term profit over long term survival, and most companies don't adapt fast enough. De Geus explains why this is, and what we can do about it, but what makes this book an essential read is that he gives us a new way of looking at organizations and the meaning of work.

The problem is that, in management, you get what you reward. This is a well-known truth and explains the dysfunction we see in most companies. As de Geus puts it, "The difficulty lies in our definition of corporate success...the dominant school of thought in business administration measures success purely in terms of quantity: the maximization of revenues, market share, share value, or proceeds."

The solution de Geus comes up with is novel and revolutionary. It is to look at companies differently -- not as machines, but as living beings. In fact, he goes even further than this, saying that companies actually are living beings. It is only because they are living that they can learn and adapt and hence sustain themselves over long periods of time.

This view seems extreme, but it is soundly based in philosophical argument and it is preferable to the alternate view that companies operate like clockwork and their employees are simply assets. The complexity of organizations can indeed be understood better by analogy with human psychology and biological ecosystems. And a company is able to survive and learn only because it has an identity that outlives any of the people working within it.

de Geus draws on the work of leaders in the fields of psychology, philosophy, evolutionary biology and immunology. He agrees with other management writers like Drucker, Collins and Buckingham on basic management truths, like the need to focus on strengths and develop people continually so as to maximize their effectiveness. However, he provides fresh and original insights on management and helps us look at our organizations in a new way.

For example, the natural consequence of thinking of organizations as living beings is that a company's primary goal becomes survival. This in turn leads to a different way of looking at the company's people. The company will survive only if there is synergy and an underlying contract between the company and its members whereby the members are helped to reach their potential in return for support of the company's goals.

Many years ago, I read Peter Senge's book, "The Fifth Discipline," and its depiction of the learning organization became an ideal for me. I didn't expect to be as profoundly affected by "The Living Company," but the ideas are, if anything, even more basic to finding meaning in work, and will likely stay with me. This book is essential reading for any leader wanting to build a sustainable company, but it's also thought-provoking for anyone who wants to make change happen in any organization.

Graham Lawes

This has become a bible in my consulting practice especially the impacts of Economic vs Stewardship models in business. This book provide tremendous insight and motivation for getting beyond the burn out many of us experience in corporate life today.

The stewardship approaches discussed and evidence supporting their viability demonstrate how any level of management can have an impact that will far out last their tenure with any firm.

One key element that could be developed, is how to utilize the stewardship model within an Economic modeled organization.

I enjoyed reading this book very much - not only from the strategic exploration standpoint.

On top of sharing his own personal and professional experiences of applying the strategies in Royal Dutch/Shell group, the author gives an excellent explanation about our innate human ability to strategise, since our caveman days. Once you understand his explanation, you will begin to realise why scenario building is quite a piece of cake.

Neverthesless, I would strongly recommend readers to read this book in conjunction with Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View. The reason is this: this book gives you only the WHAT? and the WHY? while Peter Schwartz's gives you the WHAT? and the HOW?. Both books complement each other.

If you want to be a strategic explorer, - and also to reclaim/maximise your innate ability to build scenarios - buy & read both books!

To understand more about development of organizations to me its a good book. Fairly good readeble and stil actual. Basic principals never change.

Arie provides a very good picture of companies that have sustained centuries of change. His research reveals what makes them click and what they aare doing that others are not doing. Some of his insights are packaged within the context of a company that truly has life time employment which some of us can not even imagine. His experiences in management and leadership will not necessarily ring true to many of us. Many of us simply will never have the opportunites that he has had. On the other hand, the work that he captures is excellent on sustainability and I highly recommend that if sustainability in business is an interest to you, that you read this book.